Exactly.

Yeah, it can't just be coincidence that so many former essay-company sites have been grabbed by gambling companies, and there's a good chance that it's just a single company with multiple gaming websites. I suppose it does make sense for them, and for any company hoping for its website to be seen by college students and/or college-age visitors, simply because of the demographic that would have known of the previous business operating that same url.

I don't necessarily even assume that they actually deliberately tried to spoof my ID, although that's certainly possible; I just wanted to make it clear that we're not related. It's not the first time that's happened, but on the whole, the benefits of my original choice of ID have outweighed the downside. My concern is simply that readers (especially guests) who see anything even close to "Freelance Writer" in thread titles could mistakenly assume those threads are about me.

Originally, I tried to create that ID when I first got online and signed up on AOL in 1997. "FreelanceWriter" had already been taken, but when I happened to try again about two years later, it had become available again, meaning that the person who originally had it either got off AOL or released that ID to create a different ID. Once in a while, I still get spam addressed, by name, to "Kim N_ _ _ _" who apparently had my email address prior to 1999. When I started writing for essay companies in 2003, I used it as my Writer ID and have never used any other essay-company writer ID. I did the same thing when I first joined this forum about five years later. The only reason I had to add "NYC" to it when I created my own website url in 2009 or 2010 was that "FreelanceWriter" wasn't available.

If anything, it's been very helpful to be able to build a reputation and a "brand" under the exact same ID on multiple platforms, especially in an unregulated industry where one of the most common (necessary) tactics of scammers is to change their IDs and email addresses to reinvent themselves, constantly. In that kind of environment, it's obviously very helpful to have maintained a single ID for 25+ years.

Ironically, while the current generation of AI programs is entirely worthless for writing even halfway-decent academic essays, those kinds of companies would probably be much better off tricking unsuspecting customers into trusting them if they just used AI for their website copy.

Nope. Some of my clients tried AI last year and found out, very quickly, that there's no comparison between AI-generated essays and the quality or usability of essays written by a good human writer, which you seem to have referenced, yourself, in this other thread:


https://essayscam.org/forum/es/reliable-safe-authentic-custom-services-poli-sci-3013/#msg88999

One thing I've definitely noticed is that I no longer get as many requests to "fix" horrible essays written by various essay companies and incompetent independent writers. Instead, I've been getting more and more requests about "fixing" or "editing" AI-generated essays. I usually respond by explaining that I can certainly edit those AI essays to improve their logical flow and their writing, but that I can't do anything to "fix" any content and/or sources that are either completely fabricated -- Google "AI hallucination" -- or just plain wrong, because AI relied on totally unreliable and academically inappropriate sources, such as random websites and grade-school-level online material. Those projects end up requiring a complete rewrite from scratch, because for the price of "editing," I can't go through every sentence and every citation to determine their substantive accuracy, because that would take me twice as long as simply writing the entire project (much better) myself.

The short answer is no. The much more detailed answer to (probably) every other related question you could possibly have should be found in these threads, in addition to Posts # 39, 41, 62, 64, 68, 70, 75, 79, and 85, above, right in this thread.

essayscam.org/forum/index.php?phrase=do+not+respond&searchType=2&where=0&forum=&posterName=freelancewriter&action=search&searchGo=1

While this is almost certainly par for the course with all of these scam companies and writers -- the ones that actually bother to send anything after taking their customers' money, that is -- it's still shocking to see one of them put this right on their website.

In the ocean of "fake news" Elon Musk is the biggest Blue Whale in the history of the planet.

I never noticed that kind of thing before. Good to know, in general.

Agreed. Even if the writer is perfectly qualified -- which is a very big "if" in most cases -- it's still absolutely impossible ever to guarantee a specific grade, simply because grades reflect the subjective opinion of the professor. In fact, beyond subjective opinion, grading on a particular day might also reflect the professor's mood that day, because professors are human beings, not robots. It isn't even a matter of guaranteeing the highest possible grade, because an honest writer can't promise that a project won't be better than a C, either, such as where a customer requests a C-grade, for whatever reason, which does actually happen, occasionally. Never trust any provider who guarantees any specific grade.

That would be the second site of a former scam essay company discussed here that became a gambling site.

One of the purposes of that whole "sister" company thing is that it's one of the ways that they try to stay in business as long as possible after each "sister" accumulates its own horrible reviews from disappointed and ripped off customers. Usually, it only delays the inevitable, but, unfortunately, it does allow many of them them to prolong their scam operations much longer than they'd be able to under just one company name.

There are other payment processors that provide identical two-way protection, in addition to flagging fraudulent/stolen credit cards much better than PayPal, but plenty of writers still use PayPal without any issues.

He reminds me of the guy who just copied all of the text from my old website about 10 years ago, word for word (except for my contact info, email, and any reference to having been a writer/editor for the federal government), and created a website pretending to be an academic writer and identifying himself by his real name. He had numerous scams going in various different industries. I asked one of my clients to contact him about a few "essays" and I purposely made them extremely easy projects with very comfortable deadlines that anybody actually doing this for a living would have grabbed immediately. He never even responded, which suggested to me that he was just using his essay site to create the impression that he had some kind of job to anybody Googling his name.

Always great to hear about scams that get shut down.

Students are probably much better off that most of the writers working for companies that manage to get themselves suspended by their hosts have few other options or opportunities to provide paid academic projects and just have to look for other kinds of work, as a result. Even if better, more advanced future AI programs threaten the viability of this whole industry in the longer term, the phase that we're all in right now is probably the most advantageous for students using our services. Specifically, anytime a new technology threatens an existing industry, it's usually the least qualified and least experienced providers whose opportunities in that industry dry up the fastest, thereby automatically weeding out or "culling" the provider population based on the quality of their product. Those who remain the longest tend to be the best and most experienced providers. In this particular industry, it's essentially already over for writers who haven't managed to build up their own private clientele, by now, based on their hard-earned reputations. That's also helpful to students, because professional academic writers almost always start off writing for essay companies, and it's only the best essay-company writers who are successful at transitioning to complete independence.

Well, give him a little credit for at least identifying himself honestly as a company representative instead of pretending to be a satisfied customer. However, if the company rep who hires its writers and evaluates their work can't even compose two simple "sentences" in an informal forum post, just imagine what kind of academic writing those "writers" provide.

My earlier post (#22) was intended to be 100% sarcastic, which isn't evident when you chop it up like that to quote it.

Based substantially on what some of my clients have shared with me about their experiments with AI-generated and AI-"assisted" essays, the only students who really consider AI essays acceptable are those who haven't yet received grades on them. After all, the only reason that students write these essays in the first place is to come up with something that their professors will consider acceptable.

Respectfully, I'm curious about how AI could possibly have made it more demanding to become a freelance writer, because, in my opinion, AI only makes it that much easier for people who have absolutely no business taking money from anybody for "writing" to pretend to be "writers" and (also) to dupe essay companies into selling their AI-generated essays, even if that isn't the intention of those companies.

In my experience, just from the small sample size of my own clients, most students have already figured that out. So, my guess is that it's not necessarily that companies are losing business to AI programs as much as it might just be that essay companies can't prevent their own writers from using AI.

All anybody has to do to know that they obviously can't possibly be using experienced NES writers -- especially any actually living anywhere in the First World -- is to check all of the projects listed at the bottom of the main page, complete with the writers' "earnings" for those projects. They're only paying their writers $9 - $12 per page, which is not compensation for which anybody you'd ever really want producing your academic project would even consider working, especially in 2025.

Definitely.

In principle, I don't have any problem with their hiring SEO specialists, if that's the case, because they're not selling SEO services or representing themselves as SEO experts. My problem is that there's 0.0 chance that their website text was written by a native English speaker, which, of course, means that their writers aren't NES, because it's always the best writers at essay companies who are asked to write their website text. As usual, the text is full of extremely awkward vocabulary choices that would never be made by any professional NES writer; but one doesn't even need to consider more than the atrocious grammar and punctuation mistakes throughout. Here are just a few quick examples, all from a single paragraph -- the second paragraph of the first page -- of mistakes that most NES students would know not to make by the Sixth Grade:

"Educational services help pupil ... to progress the student's scholastically." [Helps, not "help," Pupils, not "pupil" and students, not "student's."]

"UK scholar often finds their assignments" [Scholars, not "scholar" and find, not "finds."]

"This idea brings peace to graduates mind" ["Graduates" obviously requires an apostrophe, and it's minds, not "mind."]

"Also, it saves a lot of time, and money since" [There should be no comma after the word time, and a comma is absolutely required before the word since.]

That's 9 elementary mistakes in 6 sentences, without even getting into the horrible sentence structure and word choices. If an essay company can't even compose a short paragraph on its own home page without more elementary grammar and punctuation mistakes than the number of sentences in the paragraph, what do you suppose are the chances that you'll receive a well-written academic essay without similar mistakes throughout the essay?


Respectfully, this is exactly how students get scammed: they choose companies on the basis of the bells and whistles on websites, which almost all scam essay companies deliberately build into their websites to create a "professional" impression and, often, to distract from the fact that they can't write in error-free English. They're hoping that prospective customers will focus on all of those bells and whistles instead of on their horrible written English.


Respectfully, I believe it's precisely the quality of the writing on an essay company's website that provides one of the most reliable indications that it can probably be trusted to provide good writing. Conversely, paying a web developer to include all sorts of functions doesn't necessarily correspond at all to the quality of its written product. Certainly, it's possible that the good writing on a website is much better than the writing in its product, especially if it employs dozens or hundreds of writers; but if an essay company can't even compose elementary-error-free text on its own website, their projects obviously aren't going to be better than their website.

Agreed. There are few better or more reliable ways of vetting a writer than being able to verify and confirm his real name -- especially a unique name -- and location and land line phone number, independently, such as through public databases, and previous employment and/or published writing hosted on official (.gov, etc.) public websites.

The sooner the better for us writers, obviously.

Obviously, any requirement to issue any payment beyond payment for a single pending project is a huge red flag.

I'm not going to share them publicly, but professors have developed a couple of extremely clever ways of catching students using AI; and it has absolutely nothing to do with any kinds of "scanners."

No problem. However, in my opinion, there's absolutely no way to "retrain" the types of "writers" who've been working for scam companies; and anybody who actually can write well enough to do this for a living would never be working for those kinds of companies in the first place. We've all seen the kinds of completely incomprehensible ESL garbage in projects posted here by scammed clients, that were very obviously written by incompetent low-level ESL speakers who can't simply be "retrained," because they can barely speak English, let alone having the kind of (real) research and writing talent necessary to do this job even remotely well, apart from their lack of English fluency. Just consider how many natively fluent English speakers (such as many American and British students) lack high-level writing skills, notwithstanding their native-language fluency. All of my American and British clients obviously speak fluent English, but they still need my writing services.

Nor do I understand how any company that has "all but shut down" and whose only remaining revenue comes from "a few stragglers" could possibly be capable of "investing" sufficiently in their business and/or of attracting any new highly qualified native writers who are capable of providing high-quality plagiarism-free and AI-free writing. In addition to everything else, scam companies are notorious for paying their writers only a few dollars per page. Good writers wouldn't even consider working for those wages and no struggling company trying to change its business model from having been been a scam for years to sudden legitimacy could possibly start increasing their writer payouts by a factor or 10 or more without increasing their pricess accordingly; and I don't see how that's possible, either, especially, when any search of their business name and/or url leads to nothing but endless reports from clients who detail having been scammed by those same companies and urls.

Agreed. The only writers who are still able to do this for a living right now are those of us who already have a relatively large existing client base that we built up over many years of hard work.

While I can't see that website, because it's gone, I'm continually amazed that anybody would ever trust these types of sites whenever I am able to check the website copy of the companies generating these types of complaints here. Their web copy is always so bad that even most ESL students should be able to recognize the red flags that it represents. If they can't even come up with grammatically correct writing and appropriate English word and idiom use on their own websites, there's 0.0 chance that their projects will be any better. Both NES and ESL students are always much better off using experienced NES writers, because good NES writers can easily tone down their writing to much simpler vocabulary and sentence structure that isn't suspiciously good for an ESL student. There's just never any reason to trust any website that can't even come up with mistake-free web copy, because writing companies usually use their very best writers to provide their own web copy, just as I did for two of the essay companies through which I used to take projects back when I still took company projects.

Respectfully, I'm very curious what makes you think that this is actually happening, because scam companies represent an entirely different "business model" than legit providers. It's not like they already have an existing roster of good writers capable of providing quality work; if they did, they'd never have had to operate as scams, in the first place. If they've been operating as scams for years, the only things they're set up to do is take payments, teach their customer service clowns to fabricate ridiculous excuses for delivering garbage (or nothing) and/or how to threaten and blackmail customers with exposure for complaining, and hire idiots who can't write, because all their "writers" have ever been expected to do is (at most) copy and paste from online sources and/or "free write" totally unsupported nonsense incapable of passing for even halfway decent academic writing. At a minimum, they'd have to get rid of every one of their unqualified writers first, and then start hiring only good writers. What might be an example of a company that previously operated as a scam that has now evolved into legitimacy, in your opinion?

The simplest explanation is that academic writing for hire is a completely unregulated field, meaning that (literally) anybody can represent himself as a "writer" or open an academic essay company. The same is true in fields that are only "self-regulated" but still totally unregulated by any governmental entity. That's why there are so many atrocious fitness trainers and hockey skills instructors, for just two examples, with which I'm most familiar. Nowadays, gyms require "certification" by various for-profit certification entities, but that's more for their insurance carriers than because there's really any correlation between any of those certifications and even the most basic competence in the field. Those certifications are, themselves, just for-profit rackets that mean nothing, because someone with zero actual first-hand experience in the field, even training himself, let alone teaching others how to train, can become "certified" as a trainer. Rinks also typically require "certification" through USA Hockey for the same reason, but that's much more about background checks and registration to filter out instructors who aren't safe around kids than about anything related to substantive competence as a skills instructor. Even fields that do require state-mandated licenses, such as chiropractors, nurses, home health care aids, and construction contractors, are full of incompetent practitioners; but that's nothing compared with the level of rank incompetence in fields that have no regulation requirements, whatsoever, such as academic writing for hire.

I've never really worked full time as anything but a writer, outside of a brief stint as an athletic director. Once AI really does become capable of generating human-quality writing, I don't think there will be much demand for writers. When that time comes, I'll probably just retire.

Agreed.

I recognize that AI will eventually make almost all human writing obsolete, but by that time, colleges will probably eliminate writing assignments, altogether, and for precisely that reason, except in the few fields in which original writing is the specific focus. However, the AI programs currently available are useless for college essays, unless students are happy with a C- or a D. When that time does come, writers will obviously be the first ones to take the hit, but we'll be followed, and quite quickly, if not immediately, by accountants, advertising professionals, architects, visual artists, film actors, computer programmers, customer service reps, insurance brokers, paralegals, market analysts, risk analysts, stock brokers, web designers, and many other types of jobs. Luckily, as long as college and grad students still have writing assignments, we'll probably continue to have plenty of work.

Right now, AI is great for all sorts of tasks, but still totally incapable of generating a decent academic essay. The last thing students want is to pay someone calling himself a "writer" just to use AI, to provide the same crappy essay thay they could produce by themselves, and entirely for free, which is obviously why I still have a lot of clients two years into the age of AI. Once AI programs do become reliable and capable of generating good academic essays, students will just be able to use AI by themselves, also, without paying anybody else to do that for them. In the meantime, I guess I'll just continue working exclusively in the "niche" market of students who simply want a real writer who doesn't use AI, at all.

Thank you. I just want to clarify that while I can certainly write many projects at any level required, it's more about my honesty in letting clients know what my confidence level is with any project, and erring on the safe side, especially for projects that might be more challenging.

I'm thinking it's much simpler than that: Those gambling sites might just purchase defunct urls of websites that once had a lot of traffic from students because they're hoping that some of those students might do some gambling once they stumble onto their new websites. It probably has nothing more specific to do with academic essays than the fact that they once offered services to a demographic group from which those gambling sites hope to cultivate customers.

I don't use AI (or need to "learn it") because I've been (really) writing for a living for 25 years. Instead of retyping how bad AI really is for academic research here, I'll just refer you to Posts #9 & #10 in this thread:

https://essayscam.org/forum/gt/cyber-disconnectedness-growing-population-cdgp-theory-4799/#msg88150